[MUSIC PLAYING] During the Victorian era, there was no radio, television, movies, or video games. But people obviously still had free time, and they needed ways to spend it. The Victorians were remarkably creative in finding ways to spend their free time, some of which would definitely seem strange to modern sensibilities.
Sure, there were books by the likes of HG Wells, Charles Dickens, and Charlotte Bronte to read, but few could survive on reading alone. So today, we're going to take a look at how people in the Victorian era spent their free time. But before we get started, be sure to subscribe to the Weird History channel, and let us know in the comments below what other aspects of Victorian life you would like to hear about.
OK. So let's use your free time to look at how others spent theirs. [MUSIC PLAYING] Today, we tend to see cemeteries as quiet, somber, and creepy places.
But the Victorians saw them as the choice spot to enjoy a picnic. The trend of picnicking in cemeteries became so popular, that by the end of the 19th century, they actually had to create regulations to prohibit refreshments on the grounds. The cemetery picnic fad came about for a few reasons.
For one thing, there was a tragically high mortality rate among women and children during the Victorian era, meaning cemeteries were a place for family members to be close to a loved one that had unexpectedly or recently passed. For another, there was also a lack of public parks, making cemeteries one of the few spaces with plenty of lawn to spread out on. In Victorian times, public cemeteries were designed to look like gardens, unlike the more solemn church cemeteries that are almost ubiquitous today.
[MUSIC PLAYING] The Victorian obsession with the afterlife also spilled over into other areas of their lives. As interest grew in the study of science and nature, Victorians became increasingly into taxidermy. Stuffing a dead animal.
Yeah, Friday night fun time. Taxidermy had been invented only a century before the Victorian era, and early examples usually just left the animals looking pretty bad. But at the first World's Fair in London, German taxidermist Hermann Ploucquet displayed his massive collection of lifelike, anthropomorphized taxidermy to eager crowds.
The various tableaus he created included a schoolhouse full of rabbits, singing cats, and ice skating hedgehogs. If you're thinking those sound like the Victorian equivalent of a Disney movie, then you'll probably find it interesting to note that author Lewis Carroll studied Ploucquet's exhibits prior to publishing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865. Ploucquet's taxidermy was one of the most visited exhibitions at the 1851 World's Fair, and it was even a favorite of Queen Victoria herself.
[MUSIC PLAYING] With loved ones often perishing unexpectedly, Victorians developed different ways to keep the memories of their dearly departed alive. One example of this was the trend of turning the hair of a deceased person into jewelry. A husband might have a lock of his wife's hair, who had passed in childbirth, turned into a watch fob.
Women regularly wore rings, necklaces, and brooches containing the hair of a child or close relative who had passed. The Victorians even collected locks of hair for scrapbooks. Although turning hair into jewelry fell out of fashion by the mid1920s, the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn offered a hair making class within the last decade.
There's even a Victorian hair museum in Missouri that's open to the public. [MUSIC PLAYING] Victorians were enthralled with physical and medical anomalies. While freak shows had existed since the 1600s, the industry grew in the mid19th century and spawned stars with outlandish names, like Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy and Alice Bounds.
PT Barnum was perhaps the most successful at commercializing the freak show. He blew the whole thing up by crafting elaborate, typically exaggerated, stories about the stars in his show. Despite the strong class distinctions of the Victorian era, people from all walks of life attended freak shows as a form of entertainment.
One of the most famous freak show stars, General Tom Thumb, even performed for Queen Victoria and Abraham Lincoln. However, the demand for these shows drastically declined after the Victorian era. Journalists broke countless stories about the mistreatment of freak show performers, and the public moved on to other forms of entertainment.
[MUSIC PLAYING] Family outings in the 21st century typically involve trips to places like the beach or Cedar Point. But for Victorians, nothing beat a morgue when it came to sheer entertainment. Spurred on by newspaper accounts that graphically described unidentified cadavers, and obsessed with the great beyond, people would rush to the morgue to view them.
The Paris morgue was particularly popular throughout the Victorian era, and one of the city's greatest tourist attractions at the time. The building was designed to accommodate large groups of people in order to quickly identify cadavers, which resulted in hordes of people gathering to view them. When a child's remains were discovered in Paris with just a bruise on her hand, over 150,000 people came to view her after the story was sensationalized by local papers.
In some way, this trend could be seen as an early version of the true crime entertainment genre, that seemingly everybody in America is currently watching on Netflix, or a podcast they're listening to. The Victorians were the first, and they were definitely into some dark subject matter. [MUSIC PLAYING] Keeping on the dark theme, despite the grandeur of the Victorian era, everyday life was often consumed by disease and death.
Without modern medicine, a woman could easily perish in childbirth, and a child could succumb to illnesses like scarlet fever and rubella. Some children passed at such a young age that they never even had their photograph taken, at least not while they were alive. For these reasons, death photography became popular as a way to hold onto the memory of a loved one taken too soon.
In some cases, the person would be photographed lying in bed so that they appeared to be sleeping. Some photographers even went as far as to paint eyes onto the deceased's eyelids to make them appear awake. In the case of a young child's passing, the parents often took a family portrait that included the child and their living siblings.
As it became cheaper and more accessible to take photographs, and as medical care improved, the art of postmortem photography was left behind. Many such photos still exist and you can find them with an internet search. Though, we advise caution if you're easily creeped out.
[MUSIC PLAYING] As if these Victorians didn't consume the macabre enough, early in the Victorian era, spiritualism became a popular movement for those dealing with the grief of departed family members. As you might expect, this led to an increasing number of people claiming to be mediums, who could help the living communicate directly with the departed through seances. Spiritualism was embraced by the upper class, including prominent members of society, such as Queen Victoria, Mary Todd Lincoln, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
During seances, mediums would go into trances, and even appear to levitate while communicating with the spirits. Participants would also witness furniture moving, and hear phantom rappings, which are the alleged sounds of ghosts banging on things, and not the spirits of dead hip hop stars dropping rhymes. Perhaps the most famous spiritualists at the time were the Fox sisters.
When they were adolescents, Maggie and Katie Fox claimed to contact the spirit of a man who had died in their home in upstate New York. After going to live with their older sister, Leah, the three Foxes all showed psychic abilities and began touring the country as mediums. The sisters were incredibly successful until Maggie publicly confessed that their seances were a hoax.
She demonstrated to an audience how she could make phantom rappings with her toes, knuckles, and other joints. She also said that the atmosphere created during seances caused many people to experience things that did not actually exist. While Maggie later recanted her statement, it was a permanent stain on the spiritualist movement.
[MUSIC PLAYING] Victorians were limited in the types of entertainment available to them. And most of it was pretty creepy. But they were as eager to escape the turmoil of daily life as many people today.
To help give themselves that feeling of freedom, many enjoyed dressing in costume and posing in vignettes for friends and family. Derived from tableau vivant, or living picture, these vignettes would depict famous works of art or events in history. If the family had money, they would pay to have the vignette professionally photographed.
As technology advanced, vignettes could be recorded and then played back using a series of slides, music, and live narration. They were essentially the precursor to motion pictures. Vignettes gave the Victorians a place to express their creative sides, as well as embrace their love of art, history, and fairy tales.
It's kind of like cosplay before Comic-Con. [MUSIC PLAYING] The Victorians combined their interest in science and art through the creation of miniature artworks, known as diatom arrangements, that were invisible to the unaided eye. Diatoms are microscopic pieces of algae that can be arranged on glass slides, in an endless variety of intricate geometric patterns.
Diatom art pieces had to be magnified in order to be appreciated, as they could easily fit inside the period at the end of this sentence. Due to the time and expertise needed to create these strange pieces of art, they were generally only owned by members of the upper class who had an interest in the naturalist movement. Other variations of diatom art included microscopic arrangements of butterfly and insect scales.
[MUSIC PLAYING] Despite the very public way that Victorians dealt with passing on, they were still Victorians, so they were extremely reserved about showing emotions. In many cases, especially in romantic endeavors, Victorians used flowers as an elaborate way to send messages of affection, disdain, and even danger. The practice grew so popular that books were published on the language of flowers, so people would know the right flower to send depending on the occasion or message.
A red rose signified romantic desire, while yellow roses were given or worn as a sign of friendship. Mix up the two and you could have an awkward situation on your hands. We've all been there.
If a man gave a woman a red rose, she could then respond by sending back a yellow carnation to indicate she was not interested in the suitor, or for some reason, straw to indicate mutual feelings. Flowers also held significant meaning outside of courtship. For example, rosemary was given in remembrance of a loved one, while rhododendrons were sent to warn of impending danger.
[MUSIC PLAYING] Wealthy Victorians loved to bring the natural world into their homes, though perhaps in less than natural ways. Scrapbooking was a common hobby for women who spent much of their times indoors, and some used seaweed as a focal point in the scrapbook. Apparently, the rich greens and reds of the seaweed could be quite striking, and it became a popular trend.
It's reported that even Queen Victoria had her own seaweed scrapbook during childhood. In some cases, seaweed was displayed on top of a decorative lace doily. But some women went as far as writing their name in seaweed on the front page of their scrapbook.
Someone might even write a poem from the seaweed's perspective. If that sounds fun to you, feel free to leave your own poem in the comments below. So what do you think?
What Victorian era activity sounds fun to you? Let us know in the comments below. And while you're at it, check out some of these other videos from our Weird History.
